Copyright Notice

Run away! Run away! (Wilson)

Oh, couldn't it have been predicted. In the face of the coming Democratic onslaught (more of a motivation, evidently, than the ongoing Iraqi slaughter) many big-name cheerleaders for the war on Iraq have suddently gone anti-war, anti-Bush, and more generally anti-Republican. Three days ago, invasion evangelists Sullivan and Hitchens outdid each other in overt sneering at Bush, having special fun with Bush's claim that things were going "fantastic" in Iraq, with Hitchens suggesting that Bush is a hallucinating incompetent, and Sullivan saying that Bush's claim indicated that he was "unhinged" and had "lost his mind". Hitchens, coming out strong with his lee to port, rejected his characterization as a "conservative", stating that he "has no [dinner?--ed.] party affiliation"; Sullivan advised voters to take Bush's failure into account and indeed, spoke of the election as "an intervention".

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not
have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and
had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into
Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider
other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most,
which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.'

Not that Perle et al. disclaim their PNAC policies, of course. The fault lies in the implementation, you see: they just didn't count on Bush's [sic] admin being so incompetent, nor on the viciousness of the resistance. Neo-cons don't seem to realize that such extrinsic failures don't get them off the hook; even putting aside the ludicrous and murderous tenets of the PNAC agenda, neocons are specifically responsible for the disaster in Iraq in their vision of invasion's failing to incorporate the likely contingencies.